How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee

CHAPTER 3

Did Jesus Think He Was God?

WHEN I ATTENDED Moody Bible Institute in the mid-1970s, every student was required, every semester, to do some kind of Christian ministry work. Like most of my fellow students, I was completely untrained and unqualified to do what I did, but I think Moody believed in on-the-job training. And so during one semester we had to devote maybe two to three hours a week to “door-to-door evangelism,” trying to convert people cold-turkey, a fundamentalist version of the Mormon missionary, also carried out two-by-two. Another semester I was a late-night counselor on the Moody Christian radio station. People would call up with questions about the Bible or with problems in their lives, and I would, well, give them “all the answers.” I was all of eighteen years old. One semester I was a chaplain during one afternoon a week at Cook County Hospital. I was way out of my depth with that one.

Then, when I was a senior, my roommate Bill and I decided that we wanted to do our ministry as youth pastors in a church. Through Moody, we were hooked up with a terrific church in Oak Lawn, a southern suburb of Chicago. It was Trinity Evangelical Covenant Church—part of a small denomination that originated as a Swedish pietist movement that split from the Lutherans.

Bill and I went to the church on Wednesday evenings, Saturday evenings, and all day Sundays to do the youth pastor sorts of things—lead prayer groups, Bible studies, social events, retreats, and so on. Bill did this for a year; I stayed on through my final two years of college at Wheaton, and so did it for three years altogether. It was a great group of kids (high school and college). I still have extremely fond memories of those days.

The pastor of the church was pious, wise, and energetic, a dynamic preacher and a real care-er for souls. His name was Evan Goranson, and for three years he was my mentor, teaching me the ropes of ministry. My only problem with Pastor Goranson was that I thought he was a shade too liberal. (Even Billy Graham was too liberal for me in those days.) But as a minister, Pastor Goranson was one of the most loving people on the planet, and he was far more focused on helping people in need (there are always lots of them in any church of any size) than in fretting and arguing about religion. And in fact, I now know he had a very traditional, conservative theology.

Years later, when I was working on an advanced degree at Princeton Theological Seminary, this form of traditional theology had come to seem less than satisfying to me, as I had begun to entertain doubts about some of the most fundamental aspects of the faith, including the question of the divinity of Jesus. During those intervening years I had come to realize that Jesus is hardly ever, if at all, explicitly called God in the New Testament. I realized that some of the authors of the New Testament do not equate Jesus with God. I had become impressed with the fact that the sayings of Jesus in which he claimed to be God were found only in the Gospel of John, the last and most theologically loaded of the four Gospels. If Jesus really went around calling himself God, wouldn’t the other Gospels at least mention the fact? Did they just decide to skip that part?

In the throes of my theological doubt, I returned to Chicago to visit Trinity Church and Pastor Goranson. I remember the moment vividly. We were driving in his car, and I began to tell him the doubts I was having about the Bible and about what I had formerly held to be sacrosanct. He was sympathetic, since he had always been a bit more liberal and a whole lot less doctrinaire. His view was that we simply had to hold on to the basics. He told me to remember that Jesus had said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6). That was all that mattered.

Then I asked him, “But what if Jesus never said that?” He was taken aback and stunned, and, good pastor that he was, tears started to well up in his eyes. It hurt me to see, but what could I do? You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.

The question in this chapter is, Did Jesus say that? Or other things that are attributed to him? Did he claim to be the one who came down from heaven who could lead people back to the Father? Did he claim that he preexisted? Did he claim that he was equal with God? If he did, then there is a very good reason that his followers did so as well—this is what he taught them. But if he did not claim to be God, then we need to find some other explanation for why his followers did so later, after his death.

The Historical Jesus: Problems and Methods

FOR AN EXHAUSTIVE STUDY of the historical Jesus, we would need not just an entire book, but a whole series of books, such as the massive and impressive four-volume (and counting) set by New Testament scholar and Notre Dame professor John Meier, A Marginal Jew. For readers who prefer something shorter and quicker, there is my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, or superb treatments by such stalwarts as E. P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, Dale Allison, Paula Fredriksen, and many others.¹ These books all vary in a number of ways, in no small part because their authors are so different from one another in religious persuasion (or lack of persuasion), personality, background, and training. But one thing they all agree on: Jesus did not spend his ministry declaring himself to be divine.

The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did. If the Gospels were those sorts of trustworthy biographies that recorded Jesus’s life “as it really was,” there would be little need for historical scholarship that stresses the need to learn the ancient biblical languages (Hebrew and Greek), that emphasizes the importance of Jesus’s historical context in his first-century Palestinian world, and that maintains that a full understanding of the true character of the Gospels as historical sources is fundamental for any attempt to establish what Jesus really said and did. All we would need to do would be to read the Bible and accept what it says as what really happened. That, of course, is the approach to the Bible that fundamentalists take. And that’s one reason why you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.

In a few short paragraphs I want to explain both why critical scholars think differently and what approaches to the Gospels they have urged, in view of the fact that the New Testament does not provide stenographic records of Jesus’s words or picture-perfect accounts of his life.

Problems with the Gospels

The first thing to stress is that if we want to know about any figure from the past, we need to have sources of information. This may seem obvious enough, but for some reason, when it comes to Jesus, people seem to think that they simply know who he was, what he said, or what he did—almost as if they gained this knowledge by osmosis from the environment. In fact, however, anything you know about Jesus, or think you know, has come to you from a source—either someone has told you, or you have read what someone has written. But where did these people get their information, what makes them authorities, and why should you think they are right? Every story about Jesus (or any other historical figure) either is historically accurate (something he really said or did) or is made up, or is a combination of the two. And the only way to know whether a detail from Jesus’s life is historically accurate is to investigate our sources of information. The sources available to you, me, and your Sunday school teacher are all the same. Stories about Jesus have circulated by word of mouth and in writing since he lived and died. Obviously, stories that began to be told last year for the first time were made up. So too the stories that first began to circulate a hundred years ago. What we want, if we want historically reliable accounts, are sources that can be traced back to Jesus’s own time. We want ancient sources.

We do, of course, have ancient sources, but they are not as ancient as we would like. Our very first Christian author is the Apostle Paul, who was writing twenty to thirty years after Jesus’s death. A number of Paul’s letters are included in the New Testament. Other Christian authors may have been writing earlier than Paul, but none of their works survive. The problems with Paul are that he didn’t actually know Jesus personally and that he doesn’t tell us very much about Jesus’s teachings, activities, or experiences. I sometimes give my students an assignment to read through all of Paul’s writings and list everything Paul indicates Jesus said and did. My students are surprised to find that they don’t even need a three-by-five card to list them. (Paul, by the way, never says that Jesus declared himself to be divine.)

Our next earliest sources of information about the historical Jesus are the Gospels of the New Testament. As it turns out, these are our best sources. They are best not because they happen to be in the New Testament, but because they are also the earliest narratives of Jesus’s life to survive. But even though they are the best sources available to us, they really are not as good as we might hope. This is for several reasons.

To begin with, they are not written by eyewitnesses. We call these books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they are named after two of Jesus’s earthly disciples, Matthew the tax collector and John the beloved disciple, and two of the close companions of other apostles, Mark the secretary of Peter and Luke the traveling companion of Paul. But in fact the books were written anonymously—the authors never identify themselves—and they circulated for decades before anyone claimed they were written by these people. The first certain attribution of these books to these authors is a century after they were produced.

There are good reasons for thinking that none of these attributions is right. For one thing, the followers of Jesus, as we learn from the New Testament itself, were uneducated lower-class Aramaic-speaking Jews from Palestine. These books are not written by people like that. Their authors were highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation. They probably wrote after Jesus’s disciples had all, or almost all, died. They were writing in different parts of the world, in a different language, and at a later time. There’s not much mystery about why later Christians would want to claim that the authors were in fact companions of Jesus, or at least connected with apostles: that claim provided much needed authority for these accounts for people wanting to know what Jesus was really like.

Scholars typically date the New Testament Gospels to the latter part of the first century. Most everyone would agree that Jesus died sometime around 30 CE. Mark was the first Gospel to be written, probably around 65–70 CE; Matthew and Luke were written about fifteen to twenty years after that, say, 80–85 CE; and John was written last, around 90–95 CE. What is significant here is the time gap involved. The very first surviving account of Jesus’s life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death. That’s obviously a lot of time.

If the authors were not eyewitnesses and were not from Palestine and did not even speak the same language as Jesus, where did they get their information? Here again, there is not a lot of disagreement among critical scholars. After Jesus died, his followers came to believe he was raised from the dead, and they saw it as their mission to convert people to the belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus were the death and resurrection of God’s messiah and that by believing in his death and resurrection a person could have eternal life. The early Christian “witnesses” to Jesus had to persuade people that Jesus really was the messiah from God, and to do that they had to tell stories about him. So they did. They told stories about what happened at the end of his life—the crucifixion, the empty tomb, his appearances to his followers alive afterward. They also told stories of his life before those final events—what he taught, the miracles he performed, the controversies he had with Jewish leaders, his arrest and trial, and so on.

These stories circulated. Anyone who converted to become a follower of Jesus could and did tell the stories. A convert would tell his wife; if she converted, she would tell her neighbor; if she converted, she would tell her husband; if he converted, he would tell his business partner; if he converted, he would take a business trip to another city and tell his business associate; if he converted, he would tell his wife; if she converted, she would tell her neighbor . . . and on and on. Telling stories was the only way to communicate in the days before mass communication, national media coverage, and even significant levels of literacy (at this time only about 10 percent of the population could read and write, so most communication was oral).

But who, then, was telling the stories about Jesus? Just the apostles? It can’t have been just the apostles. Just the people whom the apostles authorized? No way. Just people who checked their facts to make sure they didn’t change any of the stories but only recounted events that really happened and as they happened? How could they do that? The stories were being told by word of mouth, year after year, decade after decade, among lots of people in different parts of the world, in different languages, and there was no way to control what one person said to the next about Jesus’s words and deeds. Everyone knows what happens to stories that circulate this way. Details get changed, episodes get invented, events get exaggerated, impressive accounts get made even more impressive, and so on.

Eventually, an author heard the stories in his church—say it was “Mark” in the city of Rome. And he wrote his account. And ten or fifteen years later another author in another city read Mark’s account and decided to write his own, based partially on Mark but partially on the stories he had heard in his own community. And the Gospels started coming into existence.

Those are the Gospels we now have. Scholars for three hundred years and more have studied them in minute detail, and one of the assured results of this intensive investigation is the certainty that the Gospels have numerous discrepancies, contradictions, and historical problems.² Why would that be? It would be better to ask, “How could that not be?” Of course, the Gospels contain nonhistorical information and stories that have been modified and exaggerated and embellished. These books do not contain the words of someone who was sitting at Jesus’s feet taking notes. They are nothing like that. They are books that are intending to tell the “good news” of Jesus (the word gospel means “good news”). That is, their authors had a vested interest both in what they were telling and in how they were telling it. They wanted to preach Jesus. They were not trying to give biographical information that would pass muster among critical historians living two thousand years later who have developed significantly different standards of writing history, or historiography. They were writing for their own day and were trying to convince people about the truth—as they saw it—about Jesus. They were basing their stories on what they had heard and read. What they had read was based on what the authors of these other writings had heard. It all goes back to oral tradition.

Some people today claim that cultures rooted in oral tradition are far more careful to make certain that traditions that are told and retold are not changed significantly. This turns out to be a modern myth, however. Anthropologists who have studied oral cultures show that just the opposite is the case. Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts “as they really are.” And this is because in literary cultures, it is possible to check the sources to see whether someone has changed a story. In oral cultures, it is widely expected that stories will indeed change—they change anytime a storyteller is telling a story in a new context. New contexts require new ways of telling stories. Thus, oral cultures historically have seen no problem with altering accounts as they were told and retold.³

So of course there are discrepancies, embellishments, made-up stories, and historical problems in the Gospels. And this means that they cannot be taken at face value as giving us historically accurate accounts of what really happened. Does this mean that the Gospels are useless as historical sources? No, it means that we need to have rigorous historical methods to help us examine books that were written for one purpose—to proclaim the “good news” of Jesus—to achieve a different purpose: to know what Jesus really said and did.

Methods

Here I can give only a brief summary of the methods that New Testament scholars have devised for dealing with sources of this kind. I should stress that the Gospels are in fact virtually our only available sources.⁴ We do not have any accounts of Jesus from Greek or Roman (pagan) sources of the first century, no mention even of his name until more than eighty years after his death. Among non-Christian Jewish sources we have only two brief comments by the Jewish historian Josephus. We do have other Gospels from outside the New Testament, but these were all written later than the New Testament Gospels and as a rule are highly legendary in character. There are a couple of Gospels that may provide us with some additional information—such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, both discovered in modern times—but at the end of the day they actually do not give us much. And so we more or less have our four Gospels.

Nearly everyone agrees that even though these canonical Gospels are highly problematic as sources for the historical Jesus, they nonetheless do contain some historically accurate recollections of what he said, did, and experienced amid all the embellishments and changes. The question is how to ferret out the historically accurate information from the later alterations and inventions.

Scholars have determined that some of our written accounts are independent of one another—that is, they inherited all or some of their stories from independent streams of oral transmission. It is widely thought, for example, that the Gospel of John did not rely on the other three Gospels for its information. The other three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called the Synoptic Gospels because they are so much alike. The word synoptic means “seen together”: these three can be placed in parallel columns on the same page and be seen together, because they tell so many of the same stories, usually in the same sequence and often in the same words. This is almost certainly because the authors were copying each other, or rather—as scholars are almost universally convinced—because two of them, Matthew and Luke, copied the earlier Mark. That is where Matthew and Luke got a lot of their stories. But they share other passages not found in Mark. Most of these other passages are sayings of Jesus. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have mounted formidable arguments that this is because Matthew and Luke had another source available to them that provided them with these non-Markan passages. Since this other source was mainly made up of sayings, these (German) scholars called it the Sayings Source. The word for source in German is Quelle, and so scholars today speak about “Q”—the lost source that provided Matthew and Luke with much of their sayings material.

Matthew has stories not found in any of the other Gospels, and he obviously got them from somewhere, so scholars talk about his M source. So too Luke has unique stories, and the alleged source then is called L. M and L may have each been a single written document; they may have been multiple written documents; they may have been a combination of written and oral sources. But for simplicity’s sake, they are just called M and L.

And so among our Gospels we have not only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and, say, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter); we also can isolate Q, M, and L. These three were probably independent of each other and independent of Mark, and John was independent of all of them.

In other words we have numerous streams of tradition that independently all go back, ultimately, to the life of Jesus. In light of this fact—taken as a fact by almost all critical scholars—we are in a position to evaluate which of the Gospel stories are more likely to be authentic than others. If a story is found in several of these independent traditions, then it is far more likely that this story goes back to the ultimate source of the tradition, the life of Jesus itself. This is called the criterion of independent attestation. On the other hand, if a story—a saying, a deed of Jesus—is found in only one source, it cannot be corroborated independently, and so it is less likely to be authentic.

Let me give a couple of examples. There is a reference to John the Baptist—a fiery apocalyptic preacher—in close association with Jesus in Mark, John, and Q, all independently. Conclusion? Jesus probably associated with John the Baptist, a fiery apocalyptic preacher. Or an obvious one: Jesus is said to have been crucified under Pontius Pilate in both Mark and John, and there are independent aspects of the story reported in M and L. And so that’s probably what happened: he was crucified on order of the Roman governor Pilate. Or take a counterexample. When Jesus was born, we are told in Matthew (this comes from M) that wise men followed a star to come worship him as an infant. Unfortunately, this story is not corroborated by Mark, Q, L, John, or anything else. It might have happened, but it can’t be established as having happened following the criterion of independent attestation.

A second criterion is predicated on the fact that the accounts found in all these independent sources came down to their authors through the oral tradition, in which the stories were changed in the interests of the storytellers—as they were trying to convert others or to instruct those who were converted in the “true” view of things. But if that’s the case, then any stories in the Gospels that do not coincide with what we know the early Christians would have wanted to say about Jesus, or indeed, any stories that seem to run directly counter to the Christians’ self-interests in telling them, can stake a high claim to being historically accurate. The logic should be obvious. Christians would not have made up stories that work against their views or interests. If they told stories like that, it was simply because that’s just the way something actually happened. This methodological principle is sometimes called the criterion of dissimilarity. It states that if a tradition about Jesus is dissimilar to what the early Christians would have wanted to say about him, then it more likely is historically accurate.

Let me illustrate. Jesus is said to have grown up in Nazareth in Mark, M, L, and John; so it is multiply attested. But it also is not a story that a Christian would have been inclined to make up, because it proved to be an embarrassment to later Christians. Nazareth was a small village—a hamlet, really—that no one had ever heard of. Who would invent the idea that the Son of God came from there? It’s hard to see any reason for someone to make it up, so Jesus probably really did come from there. A second example: the idea that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist proved discomforting for Christians, because John was baptizing people to show that their sins had been forgiven (“for the remission of sins,” as the New Testament puts it). Moreover, everyone knew in the early church that the person doing the baptizing was spiritually superior to the person being baptized. Who would make up a story of the Son of God being baptized because of his sins, or in which someone else was shown to be his superior? If no one would make up the story, why do we have it? Because Jesus really was baptized by John. Or take a counterexample. In Mark, Jesus three times predicts that he has to go to Jerusalem, be rejected, be crucified, and then be raised from the dead. Can you imagine a reason that a Christian storyteller might claim that Jesus said such things in advance of his passion? Of course you can. Later Christians would not have wanted anyone to think Jesus was caught off guard when he ended up being arrested and sent to the cross; they may well have wanted him to predict just what was going to happen to him. These predictions show both that he was raised—as Christians believed—and that he knew he was going to be raised—as they also believed. Since this is precisely the kind of story a Christian would want to make up, we cannot establish that Jesus really made these kinds of predictions. He may have done so, but following this methodological principle of dissimilarity, these predictions cannot be shown to have happened.

Finally, scholars are especially keen to consider whether traditions about Jesus can actually fit in a first-century Palestinian Jewish context. Some of the later Gospels from outside the New Testament portray Jesus teaching views that are starkly different from what we can plausibly situate in Jesus’s own historical and cultural milieu. Such teachings cannot obviously be accepted as ones that a first-century Palestinian Jew would have spoken. This is called the criterion of contextual credibility.

This final criterion insists that we understand Jesus’s historical context if we want to understand what he said and did during his life. Any time you take something out of context, you misunderstand it. For situating any historical personage, context is everything. And so, before proceeding further, I need to say a few things about Jesus’s context and then about what we can know about his message and proclamation from within that context, applying the methods I have just recounted, in order to see whether he talked about himself as God.

Jesus’s Historical and Cultural Context

IN BROADEST TERMS, JESUS needs to be understood as a first-century Jew. In Chapter 2, I discussed the basic religious views of Judaism at the time. Like most Jews, Jesus would have believed that there was one true God, the creator of heaven and earth, who had chosen Israel to be his special people and given them his law. Keeping the law of Moses would have been of paramount importance to Jesus, as it was to all religious Jews of his time. Later controversies are reported in the Gospels when Jesus is said to have violated the law—for example, the law of Sabbath—but in fact it is very difficult to find any instance in which he actually did what the law forbade. What he violated was the understanding and interpretation of the law by other Jewish leaders of his day, especially the Pharisees, who had developed complex rules to be adopted in order to be sure the law was kept. Most Jews didn’t follow these additional rules, and Jesus didn’t either. To that extent he was probably like most Jews. (The Pharisees were not hypocritical in developing these rules: they simply believed that one should do everything possible to do what God had required and so formulated policies to help make that happen.)⁵

One of the most important aspects of Judaism for understanding the historical Jesus is a widespread worldview shared by many Jews of his time that scholars have called apocalypticism. This term comes from the word apocalypse, which means a “revealing” or an “unveiling.” Jewish apocalypticists believed that God had revealed to them the heavenly secrets that could make sense of earthly realities. In particular, they were convinced that God was very soon to intervene in this world of pain and suffering to overthrow the forces of evil that were in control of this age, and to bring in a good kingdom where there would be no more misery or injustice. This apocalyptic worldview is well attested from Jewish sources around the time of Jesus: it is a view that is prominent among the Dead Sea Scrolls—a collection of writings discovered in 1947, produced by Jews from about the time of Jesus and not far from where he lived—and among other Jewish texts not in the Bible; it was the view of John the Baptist; it was the view of the Pharisees; it was the view widely held throughout Jesus’s world. Here I summarize four of the major tenets of this view, before showing that Jesus almost certainly held this view himself.

Dualism

Jewish apocalypticists were dualists—by which I mean that they believed there were two fundamental components of reality: the forces of good and the forces of evil. God, of course, was in charge of all that was good; but for these Jews, God had a personal opponent, the devil, who was in charge of all that was evil. God had angels on his side; the devil had his own evil spirits on his. God had the power to give life and to bestow righteousness; the devil had the power to dispense death and to promote sin. The powers of good and evil, for Jewish apocalypticists, were engaged in a cosmic battle, and everything, and everyone, had to take a side. There was no neutral territory. Everyone was on the side of either good and God or evil and the devil.

This cosmic dualism worked itself out in a historical scenario. The history of this world was divided into two phases: the present age, which was controlled by the forces of evil, and the age to come, in which God would rule supreme. It is not hard to see that the present is an evil age. Just consider all the wars, famines, droughts, hurricanes, earthquakes, birth defects, hatred, oppression, and injustice. The powers of evil are in charge, and they are gaining in strength. But God will intervene to overthrow the forces of evil in a cataclysmic act of judgment, to bring in his good kingdom.

Pessimism

Jewish apocalypticists were pessimistic about the possibilities of improving things in this current evil age. The powers of evil were far more powerful than we mortals, and even though people could resist them, they could not overcome them. No one could make this world, ultimately, a better place—no matter how many good deeds were performed, no matter how many wise political decisions were made, no matter how many helpful technologies were developed. Things were bad in this age, and they were only going to get worse until its end, when literally all hell was going to break loose.

Judgment

But apocalypticists believed that when things got just as bad as they possibly could get, God would intervene in a mighty act of judgment. In the previous chapter we saw that 1 Enoch described the powerful Son of Man who would be a future cosmic judge of the earth. First Enoch embraces this apocalyptic worldview and maintains that indeed a time will come when God will judge all the powers of evil on earth and in heaven through his representative the Son of Man. Other apocalypticists too thought that judgment was coming, that God would destroy the evil powers aligned against him and his people, and that he would vindicate those who had chosen to side with him and had suffered as a result. He would send a savior from heaven, and a new kingdom would arrive to replace the wicked kingdoms of this age. In this kingdom of God there would be no more pain, misery, or suffering, and those who entered the kingdom would live an eternal utopian existence.

This coming judgment would not affect only the people who happened to be living at the time. It would affect both the living and the dead. Apocalypticists came up with the idea that at this climactic act of history, with the arrival of the end of the age, the dead would be resurrected. All people would be brought back into their bodies to face judgment, either punishment or reward. This was a comforting idea for those who had sided with God and were being oppressed by the forces of evil and their earthly representatives as a result. A reward was coming. Moreover, people should not think that they could side with the forces of evil, prosper as a result (since these are the forces in charge of this age), oppress others, become mighty and powerful, and then die and get away with it. No one could get away with it. God was going to raise all people from the dead in order to judge them, whether they were willing or not.

But when would this promised end of the age come? In fact, it was coming very soon.

Imminence

Jewish apocalypticists believed that the world had gotten just about as bad as it could get. The powers of evil were out in full force making life a cesspool of misery for the righteous who sided with God. But they were very near the end. People needed to hold on for just a little while longer and keep the faith. God would soon intervene and set up his good kingdom. But when? How long did they need to wait? “Truly I tell you, some of you standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come in power.” Those are the words of Jesus, Mark 9:1. He thought the apocalyptic end would arrive very soon, before his disciples had all died. Or as he says elsewhere, “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mark 13:30).

Jesus is portrayed in our earliest Gospels, the Synoptics, as being an apocalypticist anticipating the imminent end of the age and the arrival of God’s good kingdom. But how do we know that this portrayal is right? If the Gospels contain traditions of Jesus that were invented or altered in the course of oral transmission, how can we tell that the apocalyptic traditions were not simply foisted on him by his later followers?

There are in fact good grounds for thinking that Jesus himself, and not just his followers, was thoroughly apocalyptic in his outlook. Recall: we need to apply our rigorous methodological principles to the Gospels to see what is historically accurate in them. When we do so, it becomes clear that Jesus held very strongly to an apocalyptic view, that in fact at the very core of his earthly proclamation was an apocalyptic message. This will be a key factor in seeing how he understood himself, whether as divine or otherwise. Let me explain some of the evidence.⁶

Jesus as an Apocalypticist

I EARLIER POINTED OUT that when establishing historically authentic tradition from the Gospels we are looking for lots of independently attested sayings and deeds. I should add here that in particular we are looking for such independently attested traditions from our earliest sources. Since stories were getting changed over time, the more time that had passed between Jesus’s life and the source that narrates his life, the more chance that traditions had been changed and even invented. And so we want our earliest sources. John is the last of the Gospels to be written, some sixty to sixty-five years after Jesus lived. The Synoptic Gospels are earlier. And the sources of the Synoptics are even earlier than the Synoptics. If we find traditions independently attested in, say, Mark, our earliest Gospel, and Q, the source for parts of Matthew and Luke, and M and L, the two independent sources (or group of sources) these other two Gospels used, then we have early, independent traditions. And that is as good as it gets.

The Independent Attestation of Jesus’s Apocalyptic Message

As it turns out, this is precisely what we have with respect to apocalyptic declarations by Jesus. They are independently attested in all our earliest sources.

From Mark

And in those days, after that affliction, the sun will grow dark and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the sky will be shaken; and then they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send forth his angels and he will gather his elect from the four winds, from the end of earth to the end of heaven . . . Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place. (Mark 13:24–27, 30)

From Q

For just as the flashing lightning lights up the earth from one part of the sky to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. . . . And just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating, drinking, marrying, and giving away in marriage, until the day that Noah went into the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all. . . . So too will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:24, 26–27, 30; see Matt. 24:27, 37–39)

From M

Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the culmination of the age. The Son of Man will send forth his angels, and they will gather from his Kingdom every cause of sin and all who do evil, and they will cast them into the furnace of fire. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth as the sun, in the Kingdom of their Father. (Matt. 13:40–43)

From L

But take care for yourselves so that your hearts are not overcome with wild living and drunkenness and the cares of this life, and that day come upon you unexpectedly, like a sprung trap. For it will come to all those sitting on the face of the earth. Be alert at all times, praying to have strength to flee from all these things that are about to take place and to stand in the presence of the Son of Man. (Luke 21:34–36)

These are just samples. And I should stress, selecting them to illustrate my point is not simply a matter of willy-nilly picking and choosing the verses that I want. I’m looking for a message that is found independently attested in all our early sources, and it turns out, that’s precisely what we find with the apocalyptic proclamations of Jesus.

It is also striking and worth noting that this apocalyptic message comes to be toned down, and then virtually eliminated, and finally preached against (allegedly by Jesus!) in our later sources. And it is not hard to figure out why. If Jesus predicted that the imminent apocalypse would arrive within his own generation, before his disciples had all died, what was one to think a generation later when in fact it had not arrived? One might conclude that Jesus was wrong. But if one wanted to stay true to him, one might change the message that he proclaimed so that he no longer spoke about the coming apocalypse. So it is no accident that our final canonical Gospel, John, written after that first generation, no longer has Jesus proclaim an apocalyptic message. He preaches something else entirely. Even later, in a book like the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus preaches directly against an apocalyptic point of view (sayings 2, 113). As time went on, the apocalyptic message came to be seen as misguided, or even dangerous. And so the traditions of Jesus’s preaching were changed. But in our earliest multiply attested sources, there it is for all to see. Jesus almost certainly delivered some such message. As we will see, this is a significant key for understanding who Jesus actually thought he was: not God, but someone else.

I stress again that it is important that any tradition of Jesus be placed in a plausible first-century Palestinian Jewish context. And there is no doubt that these apocalyptic sayings of Jesus do just that. Apocalypticism was very much in the air, as we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Jewish writings from around the time, such as 1 Enoch and other apocalypses that have survived. Jesus’s message was not altogether unusual for his day. Other Jewish preachers were declaring similar things.

But can this apocalyptic message pass our criterion of dissimilarity? Some scholars have claimed it cannot, that in fact these are words placed on Jesus’s lips by his later followers who, unlike him, thought the history of the world was soon to come to a crashing halt. I think this view is flat-out wrong, for two reasons: one is that some of the apocalyptic sayings absolutely do pass the criterion of dissimilarity; the other—this one is a bit more involved—is that the apocalyptic character of Jesus’s proclamation can be demonstrated by considering in tandem both how he began his ministry and what happened in its wake.

Dissimilarity and the Message of Jesus

A number of the apocalyptic sayings in our earliest Synoptic sources are not the kinds of things that early Christians would have wanted to place on Jesus’s lips. I give you three examples.

First, in the sayings about the “Son of Man” that I quoted above, there is a peculiarity that many people gloss over without thinking about it. This is somewhat complicated, but the issue is this. Early Christians, including the authors of the Gospels, thought that Jesus was the Son of Man, the cosmic judge of the earth who was to return from heaven very soon. The Gospels in fact identify Jesus as the Son of Man in a number of places. Do such identifications pass the criterion of dissimilarity? Obviously not: if you think Jesus is the cosmic judge, you would have no difficulty coming up with sayings in which Jesus is identified as the Son of Man. But what if you have sayings in which Jesus is actually not identified as the Son of Man? Even better, what if you have sayings in which it appears that Jesus is talking about someone other than himself as the Son of Man? Those are sayings that Christians would have been less likely to make up, since they thought he was the Son of Man.

Look again at the sayings given above. In none of them is there any hint that Jesus is talking about himself when he refers to the Son of Man coming in judgment on the earth. Readers naturally assume that he is talking about himself either because they believe that Jesus is the Son of Man or because they know that elsewhere the Gospels identify him as the Son of Man. But nothing in these sayings would lead someone to make the identification. These sayings are not phrased the way early Christians would have been likely to invent if they, rather than Jesus, had come up with them.

Or consider another saying, from Mark 8:38. Pay close attention to the wording: “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of that one will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” Now, anyone who already thinks that Jesus is the Son of Man may casually assume that here he is talking about himself—whoever is ashamed of Jesus, Jesus will be ashamed of him (that is, he will judge him) when he comes from heaven. But that’s not actually what the saying says. Instead, it says that if anyone is ashamed of Jesus, of that person the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes from heaven. Nothing in this saying makes you think that Jesus is talking about himself. A reader who thinks Jesus is talking about himself as the Son of Man has brought that understanding to the text, not taken it from the text.

This is probably not the way an early Christian would have made up a saying about the Son of Man. You can imagine someone inventing a saying in which it is crystal clear that Jesus is talking about himself: “If you do this to me, then I, the Son of Man, will do that to you.” But it is less likely that a Christian would make up a saying that seems to differentiate between Jesus and the Son of Man. This means the saying is more likely authentic.

My second example is from one of my favorite passages of the entire Bible, the story of the last judgment of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31–46; this is from M). We are told that the Son of Man has come in judgment on the earth, in the presence of the angels, and he sits on his throne. He gathers all people before him and separates them “as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (25:32). The “sheep” are on his right side and the “goats” on his left. He speaks first to the sheep and welcomes them to the kingdom of God that has been prepared especially for them. And why are they allowed to enter this glorious kingdom? “Because I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (25:35–36). The righteous are taken aback and don’t understand: they have never done these things for him—in fact they have never even seen him before. The judge tells them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (25:40). He then speaks to the “goats” and sends them away to the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (25:41), and he tells them why. They didn’t feed him when he was hungry, give him a drink when he was thirsty, welcome him as a stranger, clothe him when he was naked, visit him when he was sick and in prison. They too don’t understand—they have never seen him before either, so how could they have refused to help him? And to them he says, “Truly, I say, to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me” (25:45). And so we are told that the sinners go off to eternal punishment and the righteous off to eternal life.

It is a spectacular passage. And it almost certainly is something very close to what Jesus actually said. And why? Because it is not at all what the early Christians thought about how a person gains eternal life. The early Christian church taught that a person is rewarded with salvation by believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Apostle Paul, for example, was quite adamant that people could not earn their salvation by doing the things the law required them to do, or in fact by doing anything at all. If that were possible, there would have been no reason for Christ to have died (see, for example, Gal. 2:15–16, 21). Even in Matthew’s Gospel the focus of attention is on the salvation that Jesus brings by his death and resurrection. In this saying of Jesus, however, people gain eternal life not because they have believed in Christ (they have never even seen or heard of the Son of Man), but because they have done good things for people in need. This is not a saying that early Christians invented. It embodies the views of Jesus. The Son of Man will judge the earth, and those who have helped others in need will be the ones who will be rewarded with eternal life.

My third example of a saying that almost certainly passes the criterion of dissimilarity is an apocalyptic saying that will be important for our discussion later in this chapter. In a saying preserved for us in Q, Jesus tells his twelve disciples that in the “age to come, when the Son of Man is seated upon his glorious throne, you also will sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt. 19:28; see Luke 22:30). It doesn’t take much reflection to see why this is something that Jesus is likely to have said—that it was not put on his lips by his later followers after his death. After Jesus died, everyone knew that he had been betrayed by one of his own followers, Judas Iscariot. (That really did happen: it is independently attested all over the map, and it passes the criterion of dissimilarity. Who would make up a story that Jesus had such little influence over his own followers?) But to whom is Jesus speaking in this saying? To all the Twelve (meaning the twelve disciples). Including Judas Iscariot. He is telling them that they all, Judas included, will be rulers in the future kingdom of God. No Christian would make up a saying that indicated that the betrayer of Jesus, Judas Iscariot himself, would be enthroned as a ruler in the future kingdom. Since a Christian would not have made the saying up, it almost certainly goes back to the historical Jesus.

The Beginning and End as the Keys to the Middle

The combination of all these arguments I have mustered have persuaded the majority of critical scholars of the New Testament for more than a century that Jesus is best understood to have proclaimed an apocalyptic message. The final argument that I give now is, in my judgment, the most convincing of them all. It is so good that I wish I had come up with it myself.⁷ The argument is that we know with relative certainty how Jesus began his ministry, and we know with equal certainty what happened in its aftermath. The only thing connecting the beginning and the end is the middle—the ministry and proclamation of Jesus himself.

Let me explain. I earlier pointed out that we have good evidence—independent attestation and dissimilarity—of how Jesus began his public life—by being baptized by John the Baptist. And who was John the Baptist? A fiery, apocalyptic preacher proclaiming that the end of the age was coming very soon and that people needed to repent in preparation for it. John’s words are best recorded for us in a statement found in the Q document, delivered to the crowds: “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. . . . Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:7–9). This is a thoroughly apocalyptic message. Wrath is coming. People need to prepare (by “bearing good fruit”). And if they don’t? They will be cut down like a tree and tossed into the fire. When will this happen? It is ready to start at any moment: the ax is already at the root of the tree, and the chopping is ready to begin.

Jesus associated with John the Baptist at the outset of his ministry. Most scholars think Jesus started out as a disciple or follower of John before he broke off on his own. Jesus of course had lots of religious options to him in the religiously diversified world of first-century Judaism—he could have joined the Pharisees, for example, or moved to Jerusalem to focus on the worship in the temple, or joined up with some other religious leader. But he chose to associate with an apocalyptic preacher of coming destruction. It must have been because he agreed with his message. Jesus started out his ministry as an apocalypticist.

But the key to this particular argument is that the aftermath of Jesus’s ministry was also apocalyptic in its orientation. What happened immediately after Jesus’s life? The Christian church started. His disciples started converting people to believe in him. And what did these early Christians believe? All of our evidence suggests that they too were apocalypticists. They thought that Jesus was soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. Our earliest Christian author, as I’ve pointed out, was Paul. He was thoroughly entrenched in apocalyptic thinking. He was so sure that the end was coming soon that he thought he himself would be alive when judgment day arrived (thus 1 Thess. 4:17; 1 Cor. 15:51–53).

Jesus began his ministry by associating with a fiery apocalyptic preacher, and in the wake of his death enthusiastically apocalyptic communities of followers emerged. The beginning was apocalyptic and the end was apocalyptic. How could the middle not be? If only the beginning were apocalyptic, one could argue that Jesus shifted away from John the Baptist’s apocalyptic message—which is why his followers did not subscribe to an apocalyptic view. But they did subscribe to such a view, so that doesn’t work. Or if only the end were apocalyptic, one could argue that Jesus himself did not hold such views but that his followers came to subscribe to them afterward, and so they read their views back onto his life. But in fact the beginning of Jesus’s ministry was heavily apocalyptic, so that doesn’t work either. Since Jesus associated with the Baptist at the beginning of his ministry and since apocalyptic communities sprang up in the wake of his ministry, the ministry itself must have been characterized by an apocalyptic proclamation of the imminent arrival of the Son of Man, who would judge the earth and bring in God’s good kingdom.

Who Did Jesus Think He Was?

THROUGHOUT THIS DISCUSSION I have been focusing on the character of Jesus’s message. I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, want to suggest that his message was all that mattered to the historical Jesus or all that matters to scholars trying to understand his life. But one could argue that the various deeds that Jesus is known to have performed, the various controversies that he was involved with, the various events that led up to his death—all of them make sense within an apocalyptic framework in particular, as fuller studies have shown.⁸ My interest in this book, however, is on a theological/religious question of how (and when) Jesus came to be thought of as God. And my argument is that this is not what Jesus himself spent his days teaching and preaching during his public ministry. Quite the contrary, the burden of his message was an apocalyptic proclamation of coming destruction and salvation: he declared that the Son of Man would be coming on the clouds of heaven, very soon, in judgment on the earth, and people needed to prepare for this cataclysmic break in history, as a new kingdom would arrive in which the righteous would be vindicated and rewarded for remaining true to God and doing what God wanted them to do, even when it led to suffering.

But what about Jesus, the messenger himself? What was his role in that coming kingdom? The way I want to begin reflecting on this question is by considering what we know about what Jesus’s earliest followers said about him.

The single most common descriptive title that was applied to Jesus in the early years of the Christian movement was the term Christ. Sometimes I have to tell my students that Christ was not Jesus’s last name. Most people at the time Jesus lived, apart from the upper-crust Roman elite, did not have last names, so he was not Jesus Christ, born to Joseph and Mary Christ. Christ is a title and is, in fact, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for messiah. Saying Jesus Christ means saying Jesus is the messiah.

There are reasons for thinking that some of Jesus’s followers thought of him as the messiah during his lifetime, not simply afterward. And there are further reasons for thinking that Jesus himself said he was the messiah. But to get to these reasons, we first have to examine briefly what the term messiah meant to first-century Palestinian Jews.

The Jewish Messiah

We know from various Jewish writings of a number of ways the term messiah could be understood.⁹ To begin with, I should stress what I mentioned: the word messiah in Hebrew means “one who is anointed.” And anointed in this context always means something like “chosen and specially honored by God.” It usually carries with it the connotation “in order to fulfill God’s purposes and mediate his will on earth.” As we have seen, 1 Enoch speaks of the Son of Man as the anointed one. This is a somewhat unusual interpretation of the term, in that it applies to the future cosmic judge of the earth; but it makes sense that some Jews would interpret it in this way. Who better could be described as God’s special chosen one than that divine, possibly angelic being who would come to destroy the forces of evil and to set up God’s kingdom? From 1 Enoch we know that some Jews clearly did think of this future judge—whether he was called the Son of Man or something else—as God’s messiah.

More commonly, though, the term was used to refer not to a divine angelic being, but to a human being. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, that some Jews—especially those deeply committed to the ritual laws given in the Torah—had the idea that a future ruler of Israel would be a great and powerful priest; in the Dead Sea Scrolls this priestly ruler is understood to be a messiah. He would be anointed by God and would be an authoritative interpreter of scripture who would rule the people by explaining to them God’s laws and enforcing them as need be. This priestly interpretation of the term messiah also makes sense because in the Hebrew Bible priests were sometimes said to be anointed by God.

But a much more common understanding of the term did not involve an angelic judge of the earth or an authoritative priest, but a different kind of ruler. Again, as we have already seen: it was the king of Israel who was understood to be God’s “anointed one” par excellence. Saul was made the first king of Israel through a ritual ceremony of anointing (1 Sam. 10:1). So too the second king, the great David (1 Sam. 16:13). And so too the successors in his family line.

The key to this most widespread understanding of “messiah” is the promise that God is said to have made to David in 2 Samuel 7, as discussed earlier: he promised that he would “be a father” to the son of David, Solomon. In that sense, the king was the “son of God.” But a second thing God promised is just as significant, as he tells David: “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam. 7:16). This is about as plain as God could make it. David would always have a descendant on the throne. God promised.

As it turns out, descendants of David were on the throne for a very long time—for some four centuries. But sometimes history gets in the way of expectations, and that happened in 586 BCE. That is when the rising political power of Babylon destroyed the nation of Judea—and its capital city Jerusalem, along with the temple of God originally built by Solomon—and removed the Davidic king from his throne.

Later Jews looking back at this disaster wondered how it could have happened. God had promised that even if David’s “son” should be disobedient, God would still honor him, and there would always be a king from David’s line ruling Israel. But that was no longer the case. Had God gone back on his word? Some Jewish thinkers came to believe that the promise of God was not null and void, but that it was to find fulfillment in some future time. The Davidic king had been temporarily removed from the throne, but God would remember his promise. And so an anointed one was still to come—a future king like David, one of his descendants, who would reestablish the Davidic kingdom and make Israel once more a great and glorious independent state, the envy of all the other nations. This future anointed one—the messiah—would be like his greatest ancestor, a mighty warrior and skilled politician. He would overthrow the oppressors who had taken over the promised land and reestablish both the monarchy and the nation. It would be a glorious time.

It appears that some Jews who had this expectation of the future messiah saw him in political terms: as a great and powerful king who would bring about the restored kingdom through military force, taking up the sword to dispose of his enemies. Other Jews—especially of a more apocalyptic bent—anticipated that this future event would be more miraculous: as an act of God when he personally intervened in the course of history to make Israel once more a kingdom ruled through his messiah. Those who were most avidly apocalyptic believed that this future kingdom would be no ordinary run-of-the-mill political system with all its bureaucracies and corruption, but would in fact be the kingdom of God, a utopian state in which there would be no evil, pain, or suffering of any kind.

Jesus as the Messiah

There is every good reason to think that Jesus’s followers, during his lifetime, believed that he might be this coming anointed one. Two pieces of data must be seen in tandem to recognize their full force. The first is one I have already mentioned, that “Christ” (i.e., anointed one; i.e., messiah) was far and away the most common descriptive title the early Christians used for Jesus, so much so that they often called him Christ rather than Jesus (so that, despite my little joke earlier, it really did begin to function as his name). This is very surprising, given the fact that as far as we can tell, Jesus did nothing during his life to make anyone think that he was this anointed one. That is to say, he did not come on the clouds of heaven to judge the living and the dead; he was not a priest; and he never raised an army and drove the Romans out of the promised land to set up Israel as a sovereign state. So why did his followers so commonly designate him by a title that suggested that he had done one of these things?

This question relates to the second datum. Many Christians today assume that the earliest followers of Jesus concluded that he was the messiah because of his death and resurrection: if Jesus died for sins and was raised from the dead, he must be the messiah. But such thinking is precisely wrong, for reasons that you may already have inferred from what I have said to this point. Ancient Jews had no expectation—zero expectation—that the future messiah would die and rise from the dead. That was not what the messiah was supposed to do. Whatever specific idea any Jew had about the messiah (as cosmic judge, mighty priest, powerful warrior), what they all thought was that he would be a figure of grandeur and power who would be a mighty ruler of Israel. And Jesus was certainly not that. Rather than destroying the enemy, Jesus was destroyed by the enemy—arrested, tortured, and crucified, the most painful and publicly humiliating form of death known to the Romans. Jesus, in short, was just the opposite of what Jews expected a messiah to be.

At a later point, Christians began heated and prolonged arguments with Jews over this issue, with the Christians claiming that in fact the Hebrew Bible predicted that the future messiah would die and be raised from the dead. They pointed to passages in the Bible that talked about one who suffered and was then vindicated, passages such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22. Jews, though, had a ready response: these passages are not talking about the messiah. And you can see by reading them for yourself, in fact the word messiah never occurs in them.

Whether or not you choose to understand these passages as referring to the messiah, even though they make no explicit reference to the messiah, is beside my point at this stage. My point here is that no Jew before Christianity was on the scene ever interpreted such passages as referring to the messiah. The messiah was to be a figure of great strength who overwhelmed the enemy and set up God’s kingdom; but Jesus was squashed by the enemy. For most Jews, this was decisive enough. Jesus wasn’t the messiah, more or less by definition.

But this leads now to the problem. If belief that Jesus had died for sins and been raised from the dead would not make any Jew think that he therefore must be the messiah, how do we account for the fact that Christians immediately started proclaiming—not despite his death, but because of his death—that he was the messiah? The only plausible explanation is that they called Jesus this after his death because they were calling him this before his death.

Here is what many scholars take to be the most reasonable scenario. During his life, Jesus raised hopes and expectations that he might be the messiah. His disciples expected great things from him. Possibly he would raise an army. Possibly he would call down the wrath of God on the enemy. But he would do something and would be the future ruler of Israel. The crucifixion completely disconfirmed this idea and showed the disciples just how wrong they were. Jesus was killed by his enemies, so he wasn’t the messiah after all. But then they came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and this reconfirmed what had earlier been disconfirmed. He really is the messiah. But not in the way we thought!

I will pursue this line of thinking in the next two chapters, as I explore belief in Jesus’s resurrection. At this stage I want simply to make the most basic point. Jesus’s followers must have considered him to be the messiah in some sense before his death, because nothing about his death or resurrection would have made them come up with the idea afterward. The messiah was not supposed to die or rise again.

Jesus’s Messianic Self-Understanding

IN VIEW OF THIS discussion, what can we say about how Jesus most likely understood himself? Did he call himself the messiah? If so, what did he mean by it? And did he call himself God? Here I want to stake out a clear position: messiah, yes; God, no.

I think there are excellent reasons for thinking that Jesus imagined himself as the messiah, in a very specific and particular sense. The messiah was thought to be the future ruler of the people of Israel. But as an apocalypticist, Jesus did not think that the future kingdom was going to be won by a political struggle or a military engagement per se. It was going to be brought by the Son of Man, who came in judgment against everyone and everything opposed to God. Then the kingdom would arrive. And I think Jesus believed he himself would be the king in that kingdom.

I have several reasons for thinking so. First let me go back to my earlier point about the disciples. They clearly thought and talked about Jesus as the messiah during his earthly life. But in fact he did nothing to make a person think that he was the messiah. He may well have been a pacifist (“love your enemy,” “turn the other cheek,” “blessed are the peacemakers,” etc.), which would not exactly make him a leading candidate to be general over the Jewish armed forces. He did not preach the violent overthrow of the Roman armies. And he talked about someone else, rather than himself, as the coming Son of Man. So if nothing in what Jesus was actively doing would make anyone suspect that he had messianic pretensions, why would his followers almost certainly have been thinking about him and calling him the messiah during his public ministry? The easiest explanation is that Jesus told them that he was the messiah.

But what he meant by “messiah” has to be understood within the broader context of his apocalyptic proclamation. This is where one of the sayings of Jesus that I earlier established as almost certainly authentic comes into play. As we have seen, Jesus told his disciples—Judas Iscariot included—that they would be seated on twelve thrones ruling the twelve tribes of Israel in the future kingdom. Well enough. But who would be the ultimate king? Jesus was their master (= lord) now. Would he not be their master (= Lord) then? He is the one who called them, instructed them, commissioned them, and promised them thrones in the kingdom. It is almost unthinkable that he did not imagine that he too would have a role to play in that kingdom, and if he was the leader of the disciples now, he certainly would be the leader of the disciples then. Jesus must have thought that he would be the king of the kingdom of God soon to be brought by the Son of Man. And what is the typical designation for the future king of Israel? Messiah. It is in this sense that Jesus must have taught his disciples that he was the messiah.

Two other considerations render this judgment even more certain. The first has again to do with Judas Iscariot, the Jewish bad guy in the stories of the Gospels; the second involves Pontius Pilate, the Roman bad guy. First, about Judas. There has been endless speculation about who Judas Iscariot was—to the extent of wondering what Iscariot is supposed to mean—and about why he betrayed Jesus.¹⁰ As I pointed out, there is no doubt that Judas did betray Jesus (the betrayal passes all our criteria), but why did he do it? There are lots of theories about this, but they are not germane to the point I want to make here. Rather, I want to reflect on what it was that Judas actually betrayed.

According to the Gospels, it was very simple. When Jesus had come to Jerusalem during the last week of his life to celebrate the annual Passover meal in the capital city, he caused a disturbance in the temple—predicting in good apocalyptic fashion that it would be destroyed in the coming judgment. This made the local authorities sit up and take notice. The Jewish leaders who were in charge of the temple and of civil life within Jerusalem were known as the Sadducees. These were aristocratic Jews, many of them priests who ran the temple and its sacrifices; among their number was the chief official, the high priest. The priests were invested in maintaining order among the people, in no small measure because the Romans who were in charge allowed local aristocrats to run their own affairs and to do things as they wanted as long as there were no local disturbances. But Passover was an incendiary time; the festival itself was known to stir up nationalistic sentiment and thoughts of rebellion.

That’s because the Passover feast commemorated that episode from the Hebrew Bible when God delivered the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt under the leadership of Moses. Every year the exodus event was celebrated as Jews from around the world remembered that God had intervened on their behalf in order to save them from foreign domination. The festival, climaxing with the special meal—the Passover seder, as it came to be called—was not simply celebrated out of antiquarian interests. Many Jews hoped and even anticipated that what God had done before, long ago, under Moses, he would do again, in their own day, under one of their own leaders. Everyone knew that uprisings could occur when nationalistic passions reached a fevered pitch. So this was one time of the year when the Roman governor of Judea, who normally lived in the coastal city of Caesarea, would come to Jerusalem with troops, to quell any possible riots. The Sadducees, who were willing to cooperate with the Romans in exchange for being able to maintain the worship of God in the temple as God had instructed in the Torah, were equally invested in keeping the peace.

So what were they to think when this outsider from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, appeared in town, preaching his fiery apocalyptic message of the coming destruction of the armed forces and predicting that their own beloved temple would be destroyed in the violent overthrow of everything that was opposed to God? They surely did not take kindly to the message or the messenger, and they kept a steady eye on him.

According to all our accounts, Jesus spent the week leading up to the Passover feast in Jerusalem preaching his apocalyptic message of coming destruction (see Mark 13; Matt. 24–25). It appears that he was gathering more and more crowds. People were listening to him. Some were accepting his message. The movement was growing. So the leaders decided to act.

This is where Judas Iscariot comes in. In the Gospels, Judas appears to have been hired to lead the authorities to Jesus so they could arrest him when the crowds were not around. I’ve always been suspicious of these accounts. If the authorities wanted to arrest Jesus quietly, why not just have him followed? Why did they need an insider?

There are reasons for thinking that in fact Judas betrayed something else. Here there are two facts to bear in mind. The first is to reaffirm that we have no record of Jesus ever proclaiming himself to be the future king of the Jews, the messiah, in a public context. This is never his message. His message is about the coming kingdom to be brought by the Son of Man. He always keeps himself out of it. The second fact is that when the authorities arrested Jesus and handed him over to Pontius Pilate, the consistent report is that the charge leveled against him at his trial was that he called himself the king of the Jews. If Jesus never preached in public that he was the future king, but this was the charge that was leveled against him at his trial, how did outsiders come to know of it?¹¹ The simplest answer is that this is what Judas betrayed.

Judas was one of the insiders to whom Jesus disclosed his vision of the future. Judas and the eleven others would all be rulers in the future kingdom. And Jesus would be the king. For some reason—we’ll never know why—Judas became a turncoat and betrayed both the cause and his master.¹² He told the Jewish authorities what Jesus was actually teaching in private, and it was all they needed. They had him arrested and turned him over to the governor. Here was someone who was declaring himself to be king.

And now a word about Pontius Pilate. As governor of Judea, Pilate had the power of life and death. The Roman empire did not have anything like federal criminal law, such as can be found in many countries today. Governors were appointed to rule the various provinces and had two major tasks: to collect taxes for Rome and to keep the peace. They could achieve these two goals by any means necessary. So, for instance, anyone who was considered to be a troublemaker could be dealt with ruthlessly and swiftly. The governor could order his death, and the order would be immediately carried out. There was no such thing as due process, trial by jury, or the possibility of appeal. Problematic people in problematic times were dealt with by means of swift and decisive “justice,” usually violent justice.

According to our accounts, the trial of Jesus before Pilate was short and to the point. Pilate asked him whether it was true that he was the king of the Jews. Almost certainly, this was the actual charge leveled against Jesus. It is multiply attested in numerous independent witnesses, both at the trial itself and as the charge written on the placard that hung with him on his cross (e.g., Mark 15:2, 26). Moreover, it is not a charge that Christians would have invented for Jesus—for a possibly unexpected reason. Even though Christians came to understand Jesus to be the messiah, they never ever, from what we can tell, applied to him the title “king of the Jews.” If Christians were to invent a charge to put on Pilate’s lips, it would be, “Are you the messiah?” But that’s not how it works in the Gospels. The charge is specifically that he called himself “king of the Jews.”

Evidence that Jesus really did think that he was the king of the Jews is the very fact that he was killed for it. If Pilate asked him whether he were in fact calling himself this, Jesus could have simply denied it, and indicated that he meant no trouble and that he had no kingly expectations, hopes, or intentions. And that would have been that. The charge was that he was calling himself the king of the Jews, and either he flat-out admitted it or he refused to deny it. Pilate did what governors typically did in such cases. He ordered him executed as a troublemaker and political pretender. Jesus was charged with insurgency, and political insurgents were crucified.

The reason Jesus could not have denied that he called himself the king of the Jews was precisely that he did call himself the king of the Jews. He meant that, of course, in a purely apocalyptic sense: when the kingdom arrived, he would be made the king. But Pilate was not interested in theological niceties. Only the Romans could appoint someone to be king, and anyone else who wanted to be king had to rebel against the state.

And so Pilate ordered Jesus crucified on the spot. According to our records, which are completely believable at this point, the soldiers roughed him up, mocked him, flogged him, and then led him off to be crucified. Evidently, two similar cases were decided that morning. Maybe a couple more the day after that and the day after that. In this instance, they took Jesus and the two others to a public place of execution and fixed them all to crosses. According to our earliest account, Jesus was dead in six hours.

Did Jesus Claim to Be God?

THIS, THEN, IN A nutshell is what I think we can say about the historical Jesus and his understanding of himself. He thought he was a prophet predicting the end of the current evil age and the future king of Israel in the age to come. But did he call himself God?

It is true that Jesus claims to be divine in the last of our canonical Gospels to be written, the Gospel of John. We will look at the relevant passages at length in Chapter 7. But here it is enough to note that in that Gospel Jesus does make remarkable claims about himself. In speaking of the father of the Jews, Abraham (who lived eighteen hundred years earlier), Jesus tells his opponents, “Truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am” (8:58). This particular phrase, “I am,” rings a familiar chord to anyone acquainted with the Hebrew Bible. In the book of Exodus, in the story of the burning bush that we considered in Chapter 2, Moses asks God what his name is, and God tells him that his name is “I am.” Jesus appears to be claiming not only to have existed before Abraham, but to have been given the name of God himself. His Jewish opponents know exactly what he is saying. They immediately take up stones to stone him.

Later in the Gospel, Jesus is even more explicit, as he proclaims “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). Once again, the Jewish listeners break out the stones. Still later, when Jesus is talking to his disciples at his last meal with them, his follower Philip asks him to show them who God the Father is; Jesus replies, “The one who has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). And again later, during the same meal, Jesus prays to God and speaks about how God had “sent him” into the world and refers to “my glory that you gave me . . . before the foundation of the world” (17:24).

Jesus is not claiming to be God the Father here, obviously (since when he’s praying, he is not talking to himself). So he is not saying that he is identical with God. But he is saying that he is equal with God and has been that way from before the world was created. These are amazingly exalted claims.

But looked at from a historical perspective, they simply cannot be ascribed to the historical Jesus. They don’t pass any of our criteria. They are not multiply attested in our sources; they appear only in John, our latest and most theologically oriented Gospel. They certainly do not pass the criterion of dissimilarity since they express the very view of Jesus that the author of the Gospel of John happens to hold. And they are not at all contextually credible. We have no record of any Palestinian Jew ever saying any such things about himself. These divine self-claims in John are part of John’s distinctive theology; they are not part of the historical record of what Jesus actually said.

Look at the matter in a different light. As I pointed out, we have numerous earlier sources for the historical Jesus: a few comments in Paul (including several quotations from Jesus’s teachings), Mark, Q, M, and L, not to mention the finished Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In none of them do we find exalted claims of this sort. If Jesus went around Galilee proclaiming himself to be a divine being sent from God—one who existed before the creation of the world, who was in fact equal with God—could anything else that he might say be so breathtaking and thunderously important? And yet none of these earlier sources says any such thing about him. Did they (all of them!) just decide not to mention the one thing that was most significant about Jesus?

Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical. But is it possible that Jesus considered himself divine in some other sense? I have already argued that he did not consider himself to be the Son of Man, and so he did not consider himself to be the heavenly angelic being who would be the judge of the earth. But he did think of himself as the future king of the kingdom, the messiah. And we saw in the previous chapter that in some passages of scripture the king is talked about as a divine being, not a mere mortal. Isn’t it possible that Jesus understood himself as divine in that sense?

It is of course possible, but I think it is highly unlikely for the following reason. In the Hebrew Bible, and indeed in the entire Jewish tradition, we do have instances in which mortals—for example, a king, or Moses, or Enoch—were considered to be divine beings in some sense. But that was always what someone else said about them; it was never what they were recorded as saying about themselves. This is quite different from the situation that we find in, say, Egypt, where the pharaohs claimed direct divine lineage; or with Alexander the Great, who accepted cultic veneration; or with some of the Roman emperors, who actively propagated the idea that they were gods. This never happens in Judaism that we know of. The idea that a king could be divine may have occurred to his followers later, as they began to think more about his eminence and significance. But we have no known instance of a living Jewish king proclaiming himself to be divine.

Could Jesus be the exception? Yes, of course; there are always exceptions to everything. But to think that Jesus is the exception in this case, one would need a good deal of persuasive evidence. And it just doesn’t exist. The evidence for Jesus’s claims to be divine comes only from the last of the New Testament Gospels, not from any earlier sources.

Someone may argue that there are other reasons, apart from explicit divine self-claims, to suspect that Jesus saw himself as divine. For example, he does amazing miracles that surely only a divine figure could do; and he forgives people’s sins, which surely is a prerogative of God alone; and he receives worship, as people bow down before him, which surely indicates that he welcomes divine honors.

There are two points to stress about such things. The first is that all of them are compatible with human, not just divine, authority. In the Hebrew Bible the prophets Elijah and Elisha did fantastic miracles—including healing the sick and raising the dead—through the power of God, and in the New Testament so did the Apostles Peter and Paul; but that did not make any of them divine. When Jesus forgives sins, he never says “I forgive you,” as God might say, but “your sins are forgiven,” which means that God has forgiven the sins. This prerogative for pronouncing sins forgiven was otherwise reserved for Jewish priests in honor of sacrifices that worshipers made at the temple. Jesus may be claiming a priestly prerogative, but not a divine one. And kings were worshiped—even in the Bible (Matt. 18:26)—by veneration and obeisance, just as God was. Here, Jesus may be accepting the worship due to him as the future king. None of these things is, in and of itself, a clear indication that Jesus is divine.

But even more important, these activities may not even go back to the historical Jesus. Instead, they may be traditions assigned to Jesus by later storytellers in order to heighten his eminence and significance. Recall one of the main points of this chapter: many traditions in the Gospels do not derive from the life of the historical Jesus but represent embellishments made by storytellers who were trying to convert people by convincing them of Jesus’s superiority and to instruct those who were converted. These traditions of Jesus’s eminence cannot pass the criterion of dissimilarity and are very likely later pious expansions of the stories told about him—told by people who, after his resurrection, did come to understand that he was, in some sense, divine.

What we can know with relative certainty about Jesus is that his public ministry and proclamation were not focused on his divinity; in fact, they were not about his divinity at all. They were about God. And about the kingdom that God was going to bring. And about the Son of Man who was soon to bring judgment upon the earth. When this happened the wicked would be destroyed and the righteous would be brought into the kingdom—a kingdom in which there would be no more pain, misery, or suffering. The twelve disciples of Jesus would be rulers of this future kingdom, and Jesus would rule over them. Jesus did not declare himself to be God. He believed and taught that he was the future king of the coming kingdom of God, the messiah of God yet to be revealed. This was the message he delivered to his disciples, and in the end, it was the message that got him crucified. It was only afterward, once the disciples believed that their crucified master had been raised from the dead, that they began to think that he must, in some sense, be God.